"All the European words for
‘labor’ the Latin and English ‘labor’, the Greek ‘ponos’, the French
‘travail’, the German ‘Arbeit’, signify pain and effort and are also
used for the pangs of birth. ‘Labor’ has the same etymological root as ‘labre’
(to stumble under a burden); "ponos’ and ‘Arbeit’ have the same
etymological roots as ‘poverty’ ('penia' in Greek and ‘Armut’ in German)

$300 billion estimated job stress
costs U.S. employers ...2002

"To the extent that companies
can squeeze another drop of blood out of their existing work force, they're
doing it. Eventually you reach the point where there's no more blood to be
given, but we haven't reached it yet."

-Joshua Shapiro (an economic
researcher in New York 2004)

"It is not necessary that a
man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier
than I do."

Henry David Thoreau

"This compulsion to work
subordinates man to things.....it reduces the drives of the human being to greed
and competition (aggression and possessiveness)....the desire for money takes
the place of all genuinely human needs. Thus the apparent accumulation of wealth
is really the impoverishment of human nature, and its appropriate morality is
the renunciation of human nature and desires-asceticism. The effect is to
substitute an abstraction, Homo economicus, for the concrete totality of
human nature, and thus to dehumanize human nature."

Norman Brown

"There is no more fatal
blunder than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his
living."

-Henry David Thoreau

"When work is a pleasure, life
is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery."

-Maxim Gorky

"Work is necessary for man.
Man invented the alarm clock."

-Pablo Picasso

"It seems an odd way to
structure a free society: most people have little or no authority over what they
do five days a week for forty-five years. Doesn't sound much like "life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness. " Sound like a nation of
drones."

-Michael Ventura

"Our nation has a peculiar
work ethic. It insists that people work for a living, which is a valid
expectation, but it does not insist that the private and public sectors provide
enough jobs at livable wages for everyone who wants to work."

-Jesse L. Jackson Jr.

"No business which depends for
its existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to
continue in this country. By living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence
level-I mean the wages of decent living."

-Franklin Delano Roosevelt, address
to Congress, May 24, 1937

"Masters, give unto your
servants that which is just and equal, knowing that ye also have a Master in
heaven."

-Colossians 4:1

"The biggest change coming is
the obsolescence of skills. In the old days anybody with even routine skills
could get a job as a programmer. That isn't true anymore. The routine functions
are increasingly being turned over to machines. As time goes on, there are fewer
and fewer points where humans can work better or more efficiently than machines.
Think of it as an island of competence, with the water rising around it. The
island gets smaller and smaller and finally disappears. As computers get better
and better, it becomes impossible for us to contribute in a meaningful
way."

"It is true that we have to
work to have leisure. But it is also true that until we recognize the limits of
work, we will think that work is our human destiny. That's what the Marxists
thought, and we know what happened to them."

James V. Schall S.J.

On the Unseriousness of Human
Affairs

"One of the symptoms of an
approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly
important."

Bertrand Russell

"All the devices for
cheapening labour simply resulted in increasing the burden of labour."

-William Morris (1834-96)

News from Nowhere

"Your work is
hard. Do you suppose I mention that because I pity you? NO; not a bit. I don't
pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature
who doesn't work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as
being. The law of worthy work well done is the law of successful American
life."

Theodore Roosevelt

"All work, even cotton
spinning, is noble; work is alone noble....A life of ease is not for any man,
nor for any god."

-Thomas Carlyle

"The return from your work
must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world's need of that
work. With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get. Without
this-with work which you despise, which bores you, and which the world does not
need-this life is hell."

-W.E.B. Du Bois

"To work very hard like dogs
and hogs for sense gratification is not the proper ambition of human life; human
life is meant for a little austerity. We have to purify our existence; that is
the mission of human life. Why should we purify our existence? Because then we
will get spiritual realization, the unlimited, endless pleasure and happiness.
That is real pleasure, real happiness."

-A.C. Bbaktivedanta Swami

"There is nothing like work,
temperately pursued, to drive away the blues, dissipate mists and melancholy,
cleanse the humors of the body and clarify mental horizons."

Brother Alonzo Hollister (Shaker)

"The Shakers do not toil
severely. They are not in a haste to be rich, and they have found that for their
support it is not necessary to make labor painful. Many hands make light work,
and where all are interested alike, they hold that labor maybe, and is, a
pleasure."

Charles Nordhoff

"It is in the interest of
every man to live as much at ease as he can."

Adam Smith

"To do a great work a man must
be very idle as well as very industrious."

Samuel Butler

"To be idle requires a strong
sense of personal identity."

Robert Louis Stevenson

"It is an undoubted truth,
that the less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in. One yawns, one
procrastinates, one can do it when one will, and therefore one seldom does it at
all."

Phillip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of
Chesterfield (1694-1773)

"There is precious little hope
to be got out of whatever keeps us industrious, but there is a chance for us
whenever we cease work and become stargazers."

H.M. Tomlinson

"The real problem of your
leisure is how to keep other people from using it."

"To work is simple enough; but
to rest, there is the difficulty."

Ernest Hello

"He who neither worketh for
himself, nor for others, will not receive the reward of God."

Muhammed (Sayings of Muhammed)

"Love labor, for if thou dost
not want it for food, thou mayest for physic. It is wholesome for thy body and
good for they mind. It prevents the fruits of idleness, which many times comes
of nothing to do and leads too many to do what is worse than nothing. A garden,
a laboratory, a workhouse, improvements, and breeding are pleasant and
profitable diversions to the idle and ingenious. For here they miss ill company
and converse with nature and art, whose variety are equally grateful and
instructing and preserve a good constitution of body and mind."

William Penn

"Faith in progress is deep
within our culture. We have been taught to believe that our lives are better
than those who came before us. The ideology of modern economics suggests that
material progress has yielded enhanced satisfaction and well-being. But much of
our confidence about our own well-being. But much of our confidence about our
own well-being comes from the assumption that our lives are easier than those of
earlier generations or other cultures.

I have already disputed the notion,
that we work less than medieval European peasants, however poor they may have
been. The field research of anthropologists gives another view of the
conventional wisdom.

The lives of so-called primitive
peoples are commonly though to be harsh-their existence dominated by the
"incessant quest for food." In fact, primitives do little work.
Juliet B. Shor

The Overworked American and the
unexpected decline of leisure

"The phrase "to
accomplish" signifies a relation between my action and something else that
lies outside me. Now, it is easy to see that this relation does not lie in my
power, and to that extent it is just as appropriate to say of the most talented
person as of the humblest of men--that he accomplishes nothing. This implies no
mistrust of life; on the contrary, it implies an acknowledgment of my own insignificance
and a respect for the significance of every other person. The most talented
person can complete his task, and so can the humblest of men. Neither of them
can do more. Whether they accomplish something is not in their power; it is,
however, indeed in their power to prevent themselves from doing so. So I
surrender all that importance that often enough throws its weight around in
life; I do my work and do not waste time calculating whether I am accomplishing
anything. What I accomplish accompanies my work as my good fortune; I certainly
dare to rejoice in it but do not dare attribute it entirely to myself."

Soren Kierkegaard

Either/Or

"Our jobs are also called upon
to provide the exhilaration of romance and the depths of love. It’s as though
we believed that there is a job charming out there-like the Prince charming in
fairy tales-that will fill our needs and inspire us to greatness. We’ve come
to believe that through this job, we would somehow have it all: status, meaning,
adventure, travel, luxury, respect, power, tough challenges and fantastic
rewards. All we need is to find Mr. Or Ms. Right-Mr. Or Ms. Right job. Perhaps
what keeps some of us stuck in the home/freeway/office loop is this very Job
Charming illusion. We’re like the princess who keeps kissing toads, hoping one
day to find herself hugging a handsome prince. Our jobs are our toads."

Joe Domingues & Vicki Robin

Your Money or your Life

"If you work at that which is
before you, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without
allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your divine part pure, as if
you were bound to give it back immediately; if you hold to this, expecting
nothing, but satisfied to live now according to nature, speaking heroic truth in
every word which you utter, you will live happy. And there is no man able to
prevent this."

-Marcus Aurelius

"Owing to the extensive use of
machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all
individual character, and consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an
appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and
most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.....Masses of labourers,
crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers.....As privates of the
industrial army....they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine."

Karl Marx

Communist Manifesto

"Considerable
attention was given to this problem in America. Bishop Henry C. Potter said in
1897 that the strikes and the saloons were understandable responses to what he
termed the "mechanization" of the workman. Another clergyman wrote
that the factory worker was nothing but "a tender upon a steel
automaton," and that the piece system offered no satisfaction: "He
sees no complete product of his skill growing into finished shape in his hands.
What zest can there be in the toil of this bit of manhood?" And in England
John Ruskin complained that mechanization had turned men into "mere
segments of men." In other words, the problem was not just that workers
only made a small piece of the final object, but that in the process they
themselves were broken into pieces, as if producer and product were so closely
identified with one another that they took on each other's attributes, and as if
man, in making machines and operating machines, must inescapably lose his
"manhood" and become a part of a machine himself."

Gaby Wood

Edison's Eve: A magical History
of the Quest for Mechanical Life

"...it was in the very nature
of things impossible that the new hopes of the workingmen could be satisfied,
simply because the world had not the wherewithal to satisfy them. It was only
because the masses worked very hard and lived on short commons that the race did
not starve outright, and no considerable improvement in their condition was
possible while the world, as a whole, remained so poor. It was not the
capitalists whom the laboring men were contending with....but the ironbound
environment of humanity, and it was merely a question of the thickness of their
skulls when they would discover the fact and make up their minds to endure what
they could not cure."

William Randolph Hearst (1897)

"Work is life, you know, and
without it, there’s nothing but fear and insecurity."

John Lennon

"In Communist society, where
nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in
any branch he wishes , society regulates the general production and thus makes
it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the
morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after
dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd
of critic."

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

"Vocation finally is less
about discovering our occupation than about uncovering preoccupations. We can
leave our work at the office, but our preoccupations ride home with us. They
sleep with us too, and they dream with us. Our preoccupations are what loved
ones sometimes tell us we care about more than we care about them.

but how do we know
that our pursuit of the elusive different kind of life we call vocation isn't
finally just more self-seeking, the pursuit of still another envisioned self,
another....well, ambition? How are the preoccupations of vocation different from
those of our ambitions and our envisioned self?"

Brian J. Mahan

Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose:
vocation and the Ethics of Ambition

"Where the whole man is
involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor."

Marshall McCluhan

Understanding Media

"Toil is man’s allotment;
toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief
and sin of idleness."

Herman Melville

"The greatest analgesic,
soporific, stimulant, tranquilizer, narcotic, and to some extent even
antibiotic-in short, the closest thing to a genuine panacea-known to medical
science is work."

Thomas Szasz

The Second Sin

"Personally, I have nothing
against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone
else. I just don’t happen to think it’s an appropriate subject for an
"ethic."

Barbara Ehrenreich

The worst Years of Our Life

"It’s true hard work never
killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?"

Ronald Reagan

"Nothing makes a man so
selfish as work."

George Bernard Shaw

"Many people have left their
jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples."

Herbert Hoover (commenting on the
jobless selling apples in the street)

"Liquidate labor, liquidate
stocks, liquidate the farmer, liquidate real estate. People will work harder,
live more moral lives. Value will be adjusted and enterprising people will pick
up the wrecks from less competent people."

"We want more school houses
and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more
constant work and less crime; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less
revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to
make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful and childhood more happy and
bright. These in brief are the primary demands made by the Trade Unions in the
name of labor. These are the demands made by labor upon modern society and in
their consideration is involved the fate of civilization."

-1893,Samuel Gompers

"Only a handful of
unreconstructed reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions and of
depriving working men or working women of the right to join the union of their
choice."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Servitude degrades men even
to making them love it."

Vauvenargues

"I don’t like work-no man
does-but I like what is in work-the chance to find yourself."

Joseph Conrad

""They intoxicate
themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are."

Aldous Huxley

"This compulsion to work
subordinates man to things....it reduces the drives of the human being to greed
and competition (aggression and possessiveness)....the desire for money takes
the place of all genuinely human needs. Thus the apparent accumulation of wealth
is really the impoverishment of human nature, and its appropriate morality is
the renunciation of human nature and desires-asceticism. The effect is to
substitute an abstraction, Homo economicus, for the concrete totality of
human nature, and thus to dehumanize human nature."

Norman Brown

"How many years of fatigue and
punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable
thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events, of suffering
less."

Charles Baudelaire

"Half of the work that is done
in the world is to make things appear what they are not."

E.R. Beadle

"There is abundant data which
suggests not only that hunter gatherers have adequate supplies of food but also
that they enjoy quantities of leisure time, much more in fact than do modern
industrial or far workers, or even professors of archaeology."

Binford

"Tolerably early in life I
discovered that one of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for
a man to go about unlabelled. The world regards such a person as the police do
an unmuzzled dog."

Aldous Huxley

"What is he?

-A man, of course.

Yes, but what does he do?

-He lives and is a man.

Oh quite! But he must work. He must
have a job of some sort.

-Why?

Because obviously he’s not one of
the leisured classes.

-I don’t know. He has lots of
leisure. And he makes beautiful chairs.

There you are then! He’s a
cabinet maker.

-No, no!

Anyhow a carpenter and joiner.

-Not at all.

But you said so.

-What did I say?

That he made chairs, and was a
joiner and carpenter.

-I said he made chairs, but I did
not saw he was a carpenter.

All right then, he’s just an
amateur?

-Perhaps! Would you say a thrush
was a professional flautist, or just an amateur?

I’d say it was just a bird.

-And I say he is just a man.

All right! You always did quibble.

D.H. Lawrence

"What is He?" The
complete poems of D.H. Lawrence

"All labor that uplifts
humanity has dignity and importance should be undertaken with painstaking
excellence."

Martin Luther King Jr.

"Work is a form of
nervousness."

Don Herold (1889)

"True personality always has
vocation: an irrational factor that fatefully forces a man to emancipate himself
from the herd and its trodden paths….Only the man who is able consciously to
affirm the power of the vocation confronting him from within becomes a
personality."

C.G. Jung

"The body is a thing, the soul
is also a thing; man is not a thing, but a drama-his life. Man has to live with
the body and soul which have fallen to him by chance. And the first thing he has
to do is decide what he is going to do."

Ortega Y Gasset

"I think most of us are
looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us, like the assembly-line worker,
have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for
people."

Studs Terkel

"…..Most people, when they
are left free to fill their own time according to their choice, are at a loss to
think of anything sufficiently pleasant to be worth doing. And whatever they
decide on, they are troubled that something else would have been pleasanter. To
be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and
at present very few people have reached this level."

Bertrand Russell

"Crudely put, the relationship
between many Third World governments and multinational corporations is like that
of a pimp and his customers. The governments advertise their women, sell them
and keep them in line for the multinational "Johns."

Anna Fuentes & Barbara
Ehrenreich

Women in the global Factory

"One cannot walk through a
mass-production factory and not feel that one is in hell."

W.H. Auden

"In sum, the workers fight
over bread, they snatch mouthfuls from each other, one is the enemy of the rest,
because each searches solely for his own well-being without bothering about the
well-being of the rest: and this antagonism between individuals of the same
class, this deaf struggle for miserable crumbs, makes our slavery permanent,
perpetuates misery, causes our misfortunes-because we don’t understand that
the interest of our neighbor is our own interest, because we sacrifice ourselves
for a poorly understood individual interest, searching in vain for well-being
which can only be the result of our interest in the maters which affect all
humanity."

Ricardo Flores Magon (Speech in El
Monte , CA 1917)

"How can a rational being be
ennobled by anything that is not obtained by his own exertions?"

Mary Wollstonecraft

"It is a general rule that man
will try to get out of work. Man is a lazy animal."

Trotsky

"Incapacity of the masses’
What a tool for all exploiters and dominators, past, present , and future, and
especially for the modern aspiring enslavers, whatever their insignia-Nazism,
Bolshevism, Fascism, or Communism. ‘Incapacity of the masses’. This is a
point on which the reactionaries of all colors are in perfect agreement with the
‘Communists’ and this agreement is exceedingly significant."

Voline

The Unknown Revolution

"Without work all life goes
rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies."

Albert Camus

"Many sweating, ploughing,
threshing, and then the

chaff for payment receiving.

A few idly owning, and they the
wheat continually claiming."

Walt Whitman

"Remain independent of any
source of income that will deprive you of your personal liberties."

Texas bix Bender

Don’t squat with yer spurs on

"Nothing is really work unless
you’d rather be doing something else."

James M. Barrie

"When there are a large number
of men out of work there is unemployment."

Calvin Coolidge

"There is nothing better for
man that they should be happy in their work, for that is what they are here
for."

Ecclesiastes

"….I am traveling at a time
when man’s soul, enslaved to the machine and to hunger, struggles for bread
and freedom. Today, the cry of the laborer-hoarse from drink, smoke and
hatred-is the cry of the earth."

Nikos Kazantzakis

Jouneying

"they went to work with
unsurpassable efficiency. Full employment, a maximum of resulting output, and
general well-being ought to have been the consequence. It is true that instead
we find misery, shame and, at the end of it all, a stream of blood. But that was
a chance coincidence."

Joseph A. Schumpeter

"My own hopes and intuitions
are that self-fulfilling and creative work is a fundamental human need, and that
the pleasures of a challenge met, work well done, the exercise of skill and
craftsmanship, are real and significant, and are an essential part of a full and
meaningful life. The same is true of the opportunity to understand and enjoy the
achievements of others, which often go beyond what we ourselves can do, and to
work constructively in cooperation with others."

Noam Chomsky

Language and Politics

"Man grows used to everything,
the scoundrel."

Dostoevsky

"The better work men do is
always done under stress and at great personal cost."

William Carlos Williams

"Work is the only thing. Life
may bring disappointments, but work is consolation."

Marcel Proust

"Work isn’t to make money;
you work to justify life."

Marc Chagall

"If a man loves the labors of
any trade apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called
him."

Robert Louis Stevenson

"More men are killed by
overwork than the importance of this world justifies."

Rudyard Kipling

"I have come finally to a
simple philosophy of work. I enjoy what I do and do the best I can. That is
enough."

Maria Schell

"All the best work is done the
way the ants do things-by untiring and regular additions."

Lafcadio Hearn

"It is most important in this
world to be pushing, but it is fatal to seem so."

Benjamin Jewell

"No good work is ever done
while the heart is hot and anxious and fretted."

Olive Schreiner

"When love and skill work
together, expect a masterpiece."

John Ruskin

"The amount of time that we
spend at work has been steadily rising over the last 60 years. A 1933 law
limited the work week to 30 hours. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act
provided for a week of 40 hours. In 1948, 13% of Americans with full-time jobs
worked more than 49 hours a week. By 1989, the Bureau of Labor statistics
estimated that of 88 million Americans with full time jobs, 24% worked more than
49 hours a week."

Juliet B. Schor

The Overworked American: The
unexpected Decline of Leisure

Manufacturing employees in the U.S.
work 320 more hours-the equivalent of two months more-than their counterparts in
Germany and France.

"An "unemployed"
existence is a worse negation of life than death itself."

Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The Revolt of the Masses

"Not only our future economic
soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the
determination of our government to give employment to idle men."

Franklin D. Roosevelt

"fireside Chat, radio
broadcast 14 April, 1938"

"Unemployment insurance is a
pre-paid vacation for freeloaders."

Ronald Reagan

" A man who has no office to
go to-I don’t care who he is-is a trial of which you can have no
conception."

George Bernard Shaw

"Continuity of purpose is one
of the most essential ingredients of happiness in the long run, and for most men
this comes chiefly through their work."

Bertrand Russell

"Without some goal and some
effort to reach it, no man can live."

Fyodor Dostoevski

"Modern life has no more
tragical figure than the gaunt, hungry laborer wandering about the crowded
centers of industry and wealth, begging in vain for permission to share in that
industry and to contribute to that wealth: asking, in return, not the comforts
and luxuries of civilized life, but the rough food and shelter for himself and
family which would be practically secured to him in the rudest form of savage
society."

"We must respect those above
us. It pays. Be loyal to your employer. Don’t be fooled by wrong talk. Speak
well of your bosses to other workmen."

U.S. Department of Labor Federal
Citizenship

Textbook, 1925

"To those who sweat for their
daily bread, leisure is a longed for sweet-until they get it….there is no
country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and
abundance without dread."

Keynes

"Work and living have become
more pointless and empty….our life activities have become plastic, vicarious,
and false to our genuine needs."

Charles Reich

"Work is God for the
compulsive worker, and nothing gets in the way of this God."

Diane Fassel

Working ourselves to Death

Arbeit Macht Frei (Work shall
set you free" written on the gates of Auschwitz) could now be written on
the planet earth.) aa

"Whoever is slack in his work
is brother to him that destroys."

Prov, 18,9

OSHEK is the Hebrew word
meaning: "taking advantage of the worker."

"The gods we worship write
their names on our faces, be sure of that. And we will worship something-have no
doubt of that either. We may think that our tribute is paid in secret in the
dark recesses of the heart-but it will out. That which dominates our imagination
and our thoughts will determine our life and character. Therefore it behooves us
to be careful what we are worshipping, for what we are worshipping, we are
becoming."

Gates of Prayer (Jewish Reform
Movements Prayer book)

"Man was made to do his daily
work with his muscles; but see him now, like a fly on flypaper, seated for eight
hours, motionless at a desk."

Jacques Ellul

The Technological Society

"This frenzied activity which
has us all, rich and poor, weak and powerful, in its grip-where is it leading
us?"

Jacques Ellul

Ibid

"There are Two things in life
which it seems to me all men want and very few ever get (because both of them
belong to the domain of the spiritual) and they are health and freedom. The
druggist, the doctor, the surgeon are all powerless to give health; money,
power, security, do not give freedom. Education can never provide wisdom, nor
churches religion, nor wealth happiness, nor security peace. What is the meaning
of our activity then? To what end?"

Jacques Ellul

"There is no pleasure in
having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and not doing it."

John W. Raper

"A useless life is a living
death."

Goethe

"Servants of time are slaves
of slaves

The servant of God alone is free

When each one therefore seeks his
lot

My soul says, ‘God my lot shall
be’"

Yehuda Halevi (medieval
Spanish/Jewish Theologian & Poet)

"I shall not write (after all,
so many others already have) about the difference between conditions of work
today and in the past-how today’s work is less fatiguing and of shorter
duration, on the one hand, but, on the other, is an aimless useless, and callous
business, tied to a clock, an absurdity profoundly felt and resented by the
workers whose labor no longer has anything in common with what was traditionally
called work."

Jacques Ellul

The Technological Society

"Don’t compete!-Competition
is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid
it.!"

P. Kropotkin

Mutual Aid * 1902

"All that harms labor is
treason to America. No line can be drawn between these two. If any man tells you
he loves America, yet he hates labor, he is a liar. If a man tells you he trusts
America, yet fears labour, he is a fool."

Abraham Lincoln

"The strongest bond of human
sympathy, outside the family relation, should be one uniting all working people
of all nations, tongues and kindreds."

Abraham Lincoln

"Shadow work, unnamed and
un-examined, has become the principal area of discrimination against the
majority in every industrial society. It cannot be ignored much longer."

Ivan Illich

Shadow Work

"All told, holiday leisure
time in medieval England took probably about one-third of the year. And the
English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancient
regime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, namely
rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays
totaled five months per year."

Juliet P. Shor

The Over Worked Americans

Time itself had become a commodity.

"Half the work that is done in
this world is to make things appear what they are not."

E.R. Beadle

"Everyman is, or hopes to be,
an Idler."

Samuel Johnson

"What you do instead of your
work is your real work."

Roger Ebert

"It is a sober truth that
people who live only to amuse themselves, work harder at the task than most
people do in earning their daily bread."

H. More

"If every tool, when ordered,
or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it…then there would
be no need either of apprentices for the master workers or of slaves for the
lords."

Aristotle

"For so work the honey bees.
Creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled
Kingdom."

Shakespeare

Henry V

"The important thing, however,
is not that work is in a sense harsher than formerly, but that it calls for
different qualities in man. It implies in him an absence, whereas previously it
implied a presence. This absence is active, critical, efficient; it engages the
whole man and supposes that he is subordinated to its necessity and created for
its ends."

Jacques Ellul

The Technological Society

"To conceive a liberated
leisure means first of all to conceive a liberated labor, thus ending the mental
regime that legitimizes the opposition between leisure and labor."

Vincent Bouroure & Vratislav
Effenbeger

La Civilisation Surrealists

"When men question not the
fruits of toil but the toil itself, then philosophy in Marx’s sense of human
activity has become actual.

Charles H. Kerr C.L.R. James

State Capitalism & world
Revolution

"…The workers of the world
must unite in struggle against the dehumanizing system of work-against the whole
social process that kills the freedom and natural creativity of individuals. The
bosses war against leisure must give way to the workers’ war against
work."

Joseph Jablonski

Intro the The Right to be Lazy
by Paul LarFargue

"Men work simply in order to
escape the depressing agony of contemplating life…their work, like their play,
is a mumbo jumbo that serves them by permitting them to escape from
reality."

H.L. Mencken

"I am of the opinion that
inner happiness is impossible without idleness."

"The under classes are now
made up of those who must consume the counterproductive packages and
ministrations of their self-appointed tutors; the privileged are those who are
free to refuse them."

Ivan Illich

Shadow Work

"Gender-specific tasks are not
new; al known societies assign sex-specific work roles. For example, hay may be
cut by men, raked by women, gathered by ;men, loaded by women, carted away by
men, fed to cows by women and to horses by men. But no matter how much we search
other cultures, we cannot find the contemporary division between two forms of
work, one paid and the other unpaid, one credited as productive and the other
concerned with reproduction and consumption, one considered heavy and the other
light, one demanding special qualification and the other not,…one given high
social prestige and the other relegated to ‘private’ matters. Both are
equally fundamental in the industrial mode of production. They differ in that
the surplus paid from work is taxed directly by the employer, while the added
value of unpaid work reaches him only via wage work. Nowhere can we find this
economic division of the sexes through which surplus is created and
expropriated."

Ivan Illich

Shadow Work

"Is not all work of man in
this world a making of Order?"

Thomas Carlyle

"I was a young man in years,
but I give you my word I was a great deal older than I am now with worry,
meanness, and contemptibleness of the whole damn thing. It is a horrid life for
any man to live, not to be able to look any workman in the face all day long
without seeing hostility there."

Frederick Taylor

(inventor of scientific work/time
management)

"What forms of human labor
will still be the value after self-replicating molecular machines provide
material goods in virtually unlimited quantity at almost zero cost?"

Jeffrey MacGilliray

MIT

"In the past the man has been
first; in the future, the system must be first."

Frederick Taylor (world’s first
efficiency expert) 1880

"Nature has made no shoemaker
nor smith. Such occupations degrade the people who exercise them. Vile
mercenaries, nameless wretches, who are by their very condition excluded from
political rights. As for the merchants accustomed to lying and deceiving, they
will be allowed in the city only as a necessary evil. The citizen who shall have
degraded himself by the commerce of the shop shall be prosecuted for this
offense. If he is convicted, he shall be condemned to a year in prison; the
punishment shall be doubled for each repeated offense."

Plato Republic BkV

Some 115 holidays were observed by
both freemen and slave in old Greece and Rome. A strange delusion possesses the
working classes of the nations Where capitalist civilization holds
sway. This delusion if the love of work, The furious passion for work. The proletariat, the great class
embracing All the producers of civilized
nations, has let itself be perverted By the dogma of work, Rude and terrible Has been its punishment.
All its individual and social woes Are born of its Passion for work.

Paul Lafargue

"Work takes all the time and
with it one has no leisure for the republic and his friends."

Xenophon

"Most of us put a great deal
of time into work, not only because we have to work so many hours to make a
living, but because work is central to the soul’s opus. We are crafting
ourselves-individuating, to use the Jungian term. Work is fundamental to the opus
because the whole point of life is the fabrication of the soul."

Thomas Moore

Care of the Soul, A guide for
Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life

"As Foucault points out, under
imperialist-class labor exploitation, and Christian doctrines of innate human
corruption, the whole idea of work hand changed. Work was man’s just
punishment for being born sinful. Daily work was no longer seen as
seasonal-cyclic-ritual participation in the life of the earth (because it was no
longer that), or as sheer productiveness of wealth, but as a moral exercise or
expiation of mortal guilt. ‘Since the Fall, man had accepted labor as a
penance for its guilt. ‘Since the Fall, man had accepted labor as a penance
for its power to work redemption. It was not a law of nature which forced men to
work, but the effect of a curse.’ At least, this is how the religious and
courtly elites interpreted human work, for such a definition worked to their
advantage. People had to bend their backs in endless unrewarding labor-not to
provide the few in power with unearned luxury and idleness-but to pay back their
debt of guilt to God. Therefore the poor, seen as refusing to work, were also
refusing to be moral, refusing to be righteous, refusing to pay their debt of
sin to God. This concept of human labor has ruled the Western world for
centuries. The religious ideology of work as divine punishment adjusts people’s
minds to accept the idea of work as an exploitation of one’s life
energies."

Monica Sjoo & Barbara Mor

The Great Cosmic Mother

"Poor workers! First they’re
cuckolded, and, as if that weren’t enough, then they’re beaten! Work’s a
curse, Saturno, I say to hell with the work you have to do the earn a living!
That kind of work does us no honor; al it dies is full up the bellies of the
pigs who exploit us. But the work you do because you like to do it, because you’ve
heard the call, you’ve got a vocation-that’s ennobling! We should all be
able to work like that. Look at me, Saturno-I don’t work. And I don’t care
if they hang me, I won’t work! Yet I’m alive! I may live badly, but at least
I don’t have to work to do it1"

Luis Bunuel

(from the film Tristana)

"A man perfects himself by
working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and
stately cities; and withal the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul
unwholesome desert thereby…The man is now a man."

Thomas Carlyle

"One of the saddest things is
that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is
work. You can’t eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make
love for eight hours-all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason
why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy."

William Faulkner

Writers at Work

"Industrial man-a sentient
reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel
revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the
golden age of revolution and mental derangement."

Aldous Huxley

Times Must have a Stop

"You’ll never succeed in
idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you’ve got to take off
your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labour, the thinner becomes
his idealism, the darker his mind."

D.H.Lawrence

Studies in Classic American
Literature

"The average worker won’t do
a day’s work unless he is caught and can’t get out of it."

Henry Ford

(Henry Ford blamed the laziness of
the American worker for the depression)

"Why, it’s the best
education in the world for those boys, that traveling around! They get more
experience in a few months than they would in years in school."

Henry Ford

(comment on the unemployed riding
the rails during the depression)

Homo habilis (handyman)-Homo Sapien
(wise man)

"Present day life seems to be
based on a 24-hour lifestyle. The modern hero in our culture is the workaholic.
Our heroes are ambitious, achievement-oriented people who fill every spare
moment of the day with activities that will advance their career. No time is
ever to be wasted. Leisure time is certainly expendable…"

Stanley Coren

Sleep Thieves

"There will be little drudgery
in this better ordered world. Natural power; harnessed in machines will be the
general drudge. What drudging is inevitable will be done as a service and duty
for a few years or months out of each life; it will not consume nor degrade the
whole life of anyone."

H.G. Wells

Outline of History

"They talk of the dignity of
work. Bosh. The dignity is in leisure."

Herman Melville

"We work not only to produce
but to give value to time."

Delacroix

"There is little or nothing to
be remembered written on the subject of getting an honest living. Neither the
New Testament nor Poor Richard speaks to our condition. One would think, from
looking at literature, that this question had never disturbed a solitary
individual’s musing."

Thoreau

"Those who earn an honest
living are the beloved of God."

Muhammad (Sayings of Muhammad)

"Work is of two kinds: first,
altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to
other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is
unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid."

Bertrand Russell

"Cut off from the worship of
the divine, leisure becomes laziness and work inhuman."

Piper

"Society expects, and indeed
must expect, every individual to play the part assigned to him as perfectly as
possible, so that a man who is a parson must not carry out his official
functions objectively, but must at all times and in all circumstances play the
role of parson in a flawless manner. Society demands this as a kind of surety;
each must stand at his post, here a cobbler, there a poet. No man is expected to
be both, for that would be "queer". Such a man would be
"different" from other people, not quite reliable. In the Academic
world he would be a dilettante, in politics an "unpredictable"
quantity, in religion a freethinker, in short, he would always be suspected of
unreliability and incompetence , because society is persuaded that only the
cobbler who is not a poet can supply work-man like shoes. To present an
unequivocal face to the world is a matter of practical importance: the average
man the only kind society knows anything about-must keep his nose to the one
thing in order to achieve anything worthwhile, two would be too much. Our
society is undoubtedly set on such an ideal. It is therefore not surprising that
every one who wants to get on must take these expectations into account.
Obviously no one else could completely submerge his individuality in these
expectations; hence the construction of an artificial personality becomes an
unavoidable necessity. The demands of propriety and good manners are an added
inducement to assume a becoming mask. What goes on behind the mask is then
called "private life". This painfully familiar division of
consciousness into two figures, often preposterously different, is an incisive
psychological operation that is bound to have repercussions on the
unconscious."

C.G. Jung (1875-1961)

Two Essays on Analytical
Psychology

"Finally , I’m bored with
constantly doing nothing. Writing things down is a bit like work and I’ve
heard people say that work makes people good and honest! So there may be a
chance for me too, after all."

Dostoevsky (1821-1881)

Notes from the Underground

"While every ox and horse can
find work, and is worth being fed, it is not always so with man. To be employed,
to have a chance to work at anything like fair wages, becomes the great
engrossing object of a man’s life. The capitalist can live without employing
the laborer, and discharges him whenever that labor ceases to be profitable. At
the moment when the weather is most inclement, provisions dearest, and rents
highest, he turns him off to starve. If the day-laborer is taken sick, his wages
stop. When old, he has no pension to retire upon. His children cannot be sent to
school; for before their bones are hardened they must get to work lest they
starve."

Albert Pike

"Unemployment emerges as a
coherent social and economic problem only around the turn of the century. In
Victorian Britain, social commentators referred not to unemployment but to
pauperism, vagrancy and destitution. In the United States, such persons were
referred to as out of work, idle, or loafing but rarely unemployed. In France
and Sweden the authorities referred not to unemployment but to vagrancy and
vagabondism. These terms betray a tendency to ascribe unemployment to individual
failings and a lack of comprehensions of how aggregate fluctuations, referred to
by contemporaries as the "trade cycle" affected unemployment
prospects."

Barry Eichengreen

Golden Feter, The Gold Standard
and the Great Depression

"The Gospels are concerned
with the evil of earthly possessions, not with the praise of labor or laborers
(see esp Matt. 6:19-32,19:21-24; Mark 4:19; Luke 6:20-34,18:22-25; Acts 4:
32-35)

Hannah Arendt

"What we are confronted with
is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the
only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse."

Hannah Arendt

"Intellectual work is
important and has an undoubted place in the scheme of life. But what I insist on
is the necessity of physical labor. No man, I claim, ought to be free from that
obligation."

Gandhi

(Who got the idea from Tolstoy ,
who got the idea from Emerson…and which is probably the only new idea under
the sun.)aa

"I hear therefore with joy
whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every
citizen."

Emerson

"The Greeks and the Romans,
living in a slave economy, considered use of the hands banausic and
contemptible. Primitive Christianity, largely a proletarian movement, had
contrary instincts which were perpetuated by the medieval monks and by their
Protestant ascetic offshoot, the Puritans. But the notion that work with the
hands is integral to the good life was slow to make an impression on our
cultural tradition, presumably because society remained largely aristocratic or
hierarchical in organization. Today we have forgotten, or can scarcely believe,
the degree to which manual operations were once avoided by those who were, or
aspired to be, of the upper crust.

The secret of the almost explosive
originality of our times is the wiping our (save in certain cultural backwaters)
of the ancient barrier between the aristocrat and the worker. Americans, whose
ancestors first created a large-scale equalitarian community, should take
particular pride in this reunion of the human hand and brain into their proper
organic whole: the ideal image of the person is no longer the armless Venus of
Melos."

Lynn White, Jr.

Dynamo & Virgin Reconsidered

"The discussion between
Socrates and Eutherus in Xenophon’s ‘Memorabilia’ is quite interesting:
Eutherus is forced by necessity to labor with his body and is sure that his body
will not be able to stand this kind of life for very long and also that in his
old age he will be destitute. Still, he thinks that to labor is better than to
beg. Whereupon Socrates proposes that he look for some body "who is better
off and needs an assistant." Eutherus replies that he could not bear
servitude."

Hannah Arendt

"The most obvious facts are
the most easily forgotten. Both the existing economic order and too many of the
projects advanced for reconstructing it break down through their neglect of the
truism that, since even quite common men have souls, no increase in material
wealth will compensate them for arrangements which insult their self-respect and
impair their freedom. A reasonable estimate of economic organization must allow
for the fact that, unless industry is to be paralyzed by recurrent revolts on
the part of outraged human nature, it must satisfy criteria which are not purely
economic."

R.H. Tawney

Religion and the Rise of
Capitalism

"And so bodily labour which
even after original sin was decreed by Providence for the good of man’s body
and soul, is in many instances changed into an instrument of perversion; for
from the factory dead matter goes out improved, whereas men there are corrupted
and degraded."

Pope Pius XI

"The rack has been abolished.
But the boredom, the frightful punctuality of wheels returning again and again
to the same old position-these remain. Remain under free enterprise, remain
under Socialism, remain under Communism."

Aldous Huxley

"Labor and work are
distinguished in Hesiod; only work is due to Eris, the goddess of good strife,
but labor, like all other evils, came out of Pandora’s box, and is punishment
of Zeus because Prometheus "the crafty deceived him." Since then the
"gods have hidden life from men" and their curse hits "the
bread-eating men."

Hannah Arendt

"I am convinced that to
maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will
live simply."

Thoreau

"Still the only thing in life
that’s really worth working for is the one dream that’s big enough to absorb
every single ounce of strength and every other possible resource you can
muster."

John Shuttleworth

If we can recover the sense that it
is the most natural thing for every person born into this world to use his hands
in a productive way and that it is not beyond the wit of man to make this
possible, then I think the problem of unemployment will disappear and we shall
soon be asking ourselves how we can get all the work done that needs to be
done."

E.F. Schumacher

"Work is less boring than
amusing oneself."

"It is well for a man to
respect his own vocation whatever it is, and to think himself bound to uphold
it, and to claim for it the respect it deserves."

Charles Dickens

"I do not believe that we have
unemployment in the world at all. What we have is misemployment."

Matt Fox

Original Blessings

"He is not only idle who does
nothing, but he is idle who might be better employed."

Socrates

"It is not true that there is
dignity in all work. Some jobs are definitely better than others. It is not hard
to tell the good jobs from the bad. People who have good jobs are happy, rich,
and well dressed. People who have bad jobs are unhappy, poor and use meat
extenders. Those who seek dignity in the type of work that compels them to help
hamburgers are certain to be disappointed. Also be behaving badly."

Fran Lebowitz

Metropolitan Life

"Let every one do something,
according to the measure of his capacities. To have no regular work, no set
sphere of activity-what a miserable thing it is!"

Schopenhaur

"It is a pleasing paradox that
busy people-people who work to do and do it-seem to be especially interested in
the world and enjoy ever aspect of it."

Annie Dillard

"Implicit in the lesson of the
work ethic was the idea of control-that we create our own fate, that we are
solely responsible for our destiny…..Many of those who did believe (in that)
have had their dreams dashed by the onslaught of statistics, with names and
faces attached, that have coursed through American business these past few
years."

Randall Rothenberg

" Take so obvious and simple a
thing as work. It is something that our days we have had to do. It has been
explained in the past as everything from a curse for our first disobedience to
"love made visible". Whatever the explanations, we have had, through
history, to proceed in the sweat of our faces. In the course of that experience,
we have learned some very bad things about work. Some have worked far too hard,
some have begun far too soon, some have gone on far too long; some (in recent
times an increasing number) have worked at jobs of paralyzing dullness, jobs
meaningless in any way save for the payments (sometimes quite high payments)
received.

The most obvious way to avoid the
indignities , injustices, pains, and sorrows of all this hard labor is to get
out of it. A considerable start has been made in this direction. The technical
systems we have devised move toward the displacement in many kinds of work of
human beings by machinery. It seems possible to look forward to a time, if we
continue in this way, when there will not be very much to do.

Given our backbreaking history, it
is perhaps altogether natural to proceed in the belief that it will be enough to
lift the weights from all men’s shoulders. Acting in this faith, we have
already gone far enough to create a new thing called leisure. And we have done pretty
well in thinking of ways to deal with that-snowmobiles, ten-day-flights to
faraway places that become steadily more like the places we left so that we may
feel at home, the Green bay Packers on Monday night, Las Vegas, campers. There
is even talk of continuing education. This is all very well, but it may not
serve indefinitely and it may, at best, only be treating symptoms. The fact
remains that we as yet do not know much about the place of work in man’s
nature. Is it (even if it ceases to be stark, necessity) a perennial curse, a
manifestation of love, a biological need, a neurotic necessity, or just
something which under certain conditions men and women like to do? And if it is
a given in our nature, in what conditions can work be performed so that it is a
source of satisfaction? How, in other words, can the jobs, the machines, and the
technical systems be designed to fit not so much the claims of production as the
requirements of human beings? To answer such a question, we need to know much
more about men and work than we do now."

Elting E. Morison

From Know-how to Nowhere

"Henry David Thoreau, who
never earned much of a living or sustained a relationship with any woman that
wasn’t brotherly-who lived mostly under his parents’ roof…..who advocated
one day’s work and six days "off" as the weekly round and was
considered a bit of a fool in his hometown….is probably the American writer
who tells us best how to live comfortably with our most constant companion,
ourselves."

Edward Hoagland

See article: "So hard to find
Good Employers these Days" by Monique P. Yazigi, New York Times,
Mon, Aug 16,1999

See Book: "The Corrosion of
Character: The personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism……by
Richard Sennett

"Work in the modern world of
business, corrodes trust, loyalty, and mutual commitment, inflicts
"demeaning superficiality" on human relationships, and even destroys
people’s very identity and sense of themselves by "threatening the
ability of people to form their characters into sustained narratives."

Richard Sennett (Professor of
Sociology at New York University and the London School of Economics.)

"AMERICA LEADS THE WORLD IN
HOURS WORKED"

by Elizabeth Olson….New York
Times….Tuesday, Sept 7,1999

"And it is a way of life that
has always irritated foreigners extremely. Why, one hears, don’t the Corsicans
work harder, clear more of the maquis, produce more food? How dare they sit
about on walls and stones doing nothing at all? The sight of Corsicans of all
ages sitting about doing nothing is positively outraging to many visitors. So
are the answers to their questions (though seldom given) ‘ that the Corsicans
see no reason to work any harder, to grow more food, when they already have
enough to eat, and that if they did they would have great difficulty in selling
their surpluses. Moreover (and this, I suspect, is what most infuriates office
employees on holiday), there is no one to make them work all day: their lands
belongs to them, as does their time. Leisure or laziness-call it which you
will-is their one luxury , tenaciously preserved in the absence of all others; a
luxury so inaccessible even to the prosperous tourist that he is likely to
regard it as a sin.

Yet this was men’s birthright,
the world over, before landowners and employers got control of them and forced
them, by threat of hunger, to labor all day long. Red Indians and other
so-called savages lived like this before the Europeans took them in hand. The
Corsicans may have missed many of the benefits of civilization, but they have
also escaped its inhuman servitudes. And they are proud of the achievement. One
evening, as a change from tale of phantoms and mazzeri my husband was
giving character-sketches of the different races of Europe. "The Dutch’ ,
he said ‘spend their lives working as hard as possible.’ ‘Then they must
be barbarians!’ the Cesari chorused, in genuine dismay."

Dorothy Carrington

Corsica

See: The One Best Way: Frederick
Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency.

By Robert Kanigel

"Industry rules the world
without faith or poetry. In our time it unites and divides people. It determines
one’s fatherland, it delineates classes, it lies at the base of state
structures, it moves nations, it declares war, makes peace, changes ‘mores’,
gives direction to science, and determines the character of cultures. Men bow
down before it and erect temples to it. It is the real deity in which people
sincerely believe and to which they submit. Unselfish activity has become
inconceivable; it has acquired the same significance in the contemporary world
as chivalry had in the time of Cervantes."

Kireevsky (Russian Philosopher
about 1830)

"A man who is not industrious
will always have to borrow from others, and will never have things of his own.
He will be envious and tempted to steal. He will be unhappy. The energetic man
is happy and pleasant to speak with; he is remembered and visited on his
deathbed. But no one mourns for the lazy man."

Black Elk

"Perpetual devotion to what a
man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many
other things."

Robert Louis Stevenson

"The labour of some of the
most respectable orders in the society is, like that of menial servants,
unproductive of any value," says Adam Smith and ranks among them "the
whole army and navy," the "servants of the public," and the
liberal professions, such as "churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of
letters of all kinds." Their work, " like the declamation of the
actors, the harangue of the orator, or the tune of the musician….perishes in
the very instant of its production. "Obviously, Smith would not have had
any difficulty classifying our "white-collar jobs."

Hannah Arendt

"The only activity Jesus of
Nazareth recommends in his preaching is action, and the only human capacity he
stresses is the capacity "to perform miracles."

Hannah Arendt

"For even now , laboring is
too lofty, too ambitious a word for what we are doing, or think we are doing, in
the world we have come to live in. the last stage of the laboring society, the
society of jobholders, demands of its members a sheer automatic functioning, as
though individual life had actually been submerged in the over-all life process
of the species and the only active decision still required of the individual
were to let go, so to speak, to abandon his individuality, the still
individually sensed pain and trouble of living, and acquiesce in a dazed
"tranquillized," functional type of behavior. The trouble with modern
theories of behaviorism is not that they are wrong but that they could become
true, that they actually are the best possible conceptualization of certain
obvious trends in modern society.-which began with such an unprecedented and
promising outburst of human activity-may end in the deadliest, most sterile
passivity history has ever known."

Hannah Arendt

"Work is the only occupation
yet invented which mankind has been able to endure in any but the smallest
possible doses."

C.E.M. Joad

"Work is love made visible.

And if you cannot work with love
but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at
the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy."

Kahlil Gibran

"Both gods and men are wroth
with a man who lives in idleness for in nature he is like the stingless drones
who waste the labor of the bees, eating without working; but let it be your care
to order your work properly, that in the right season your barns may be full.
Through work men grow rich in flocks and substance and working they are much
loved by the immortals. Work is no disgrace, it is idleness that is a
disgrace."

Hesiod

"Contrary to what some modern
interpreters have tried to read into Christian sources, there are no indications
of the modern glorification of laboring in the New Testament or in other
premodern Christian writers. Paul, who has been called "the apostle of
labor", was nothing of the sort, and the few passages on which this claim
is based either are addressed to those who out of laziness "ate other men’s
bread" or they recommend labor as a good means to keep out of trouble, that
is, they reinforce the general prescription of a strictly private life and warn
of political activities. It is even more relevant that in later Christian
philosophy, and particularly in Thomas Aquinas, labor had become a duty for
those who had no other means to keep alive, the duty consisting in keeping one’s
self alive and not in laboring; if one could provide for himself through
beggary, so much the better. Whoever reads the sources without modern prolabour
prejudices will be surprised at how little the church fathers availed themselves
even of the obvious opportunity to justify labor as punishment for original sin.
Thus Thomas does not hesitate to follow Aristotle rather than the Bible in this
question and to assert that "Only the necessity to keep alive compels to do
manual labor." Labor to him is nature’s way of keeping the human species
alive, and from this he concludes that it is by no means necessary at that all
men earn their bread by the sweat of their brows, but that this is rather a kind
of last resort to solve the problem or fulfill the duty. Not even the use of
labor as a means with which to ward off the dangers of otiosity is a new
Christian discovery, but was already a commonplace of Roman morality. In
complete agreement with ancient convictions about the character of the laboring
activity, finally, is the frequent Christian use for the mortification of the
flesh, where labor, especially in the monasteries, sometimes played the same
role as other painful exercises and forms of self-torture."

Hannah Arendt

"Traditional wisdom teaches
that the function of work is at heart threefold: (1) To give a person a chance
to utilize and develop his faculties; (2) To enable him to overcome his inborn
egocentricity by joining with other people in a common task; and (3) to bring
forth the goods and services needed by all of us for a decent existence. I think all this needs to be taught."

E.F. Schumacher

Good Work

"The Middle Ages, believing
that the Heavenly Jerusalem contains no temple, began to explore the practical
implications of this profoundly Christian paradox. Although to labor is to pray,
the goal of labor is to end labor."

Lynn White

The Virgin and the Dynamo
Reconsidered

"St. Benedict of Nursia, the
founder of the Benedictine Order, is probably the pivotal figure in the history
of labor. Greco-Roman society had rested on the back of slaves. Work was the lot
of slaves, and any free man who dirtied his hands with it, even in the most
casual way, demeaned himself. Plato once sharply rebuked two friends who had
constructed an apparatus to help solve a geometrical problem: they were
contaminating thought. Plutarch tells us that Archimedes was ashamed of the
machines he had built. Senaca remarks that the inventions of his time, such as
stenography, were naturally the work of slaves, since slaves alone were
concerned with such things. In the classical tradition there is scarcely a hint
of the dignity of labor. The provision of Benedict, himself an aristocrat, that
his monks should work in fields and shops therefore marks a revolutionary
reversal of the traditional attitude toward labor; it is a high peak along the
watershed separating the modern from the ancient world. For the Benedictine
monks regarded manual labor not as a mere regrettable necessity of their
corporate life but rather as an integral and spiritually valuable part of their
discipline. During the Middle Ages the general reverence for the laboring monks
did much to increase the prestige of labor and the self-respect of the laborer.
Moreover, since the days of St. Benedict every major form of Western asceticism
has held that to "labor is to pray", until in its final development
under the Puritans, labor in one’s "calling" became not only the
prime moral necessity but also the chief means of serving and praising
God."

Lynn White jr.

The Virgin and the Dynamo
reconsidered

"I never realized what a toll
the fierce competition of American business and professional life has taken on
many of our most talented and successful men. Many of them have simply been
worked out in the struggle. Many more have all kinds of family problems they
cannot leave. In a great many cases they have taken to drink to such an extent
that the risk is too great."

(A member of the Nixon cabinet
commenting on the difficulty of recruiting personnel for top Federal posts. N.Y.
Times 1969)

"Extreme busyness,
whether at school or college kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality;
and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of
personal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who
are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional
occupation. Bring these fellow into the country, or set them aboard ship, and
you will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no
curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not
take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless
Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no
good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not
generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not
dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mil. When they do not require to go to
the office, the whole breathing world is a blur to them."

Robert Louis Stevenson

Bosses, bureaucrats, and experts are going the way of kings, priests, and
landlords."

L.S. Stavrianos

The Promise of the Coming Dark
Age

"The object of the capitalist
class is to develop workers who will work for their masters but not for
themselves, fight for their masters, but not for their own class, and who will
think just as their masters want them to think. In order to accomplish these
ends, the capitalist class has secured control of almost all means of education.
Newspapers, schools, and churches are owned or controlled by them in order that
the minds of the workers , and more especially the minds of the children of the
workers, may be controlled."

Queen Silver (Speaking at the
Knights of Pythias Hall in Los Angeles on May 2,1925)

"The fact is that the work
which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and
increases power, and enriches literature, and elevates thought, is not done to
secure a living. It is not the work of slaves, driven to their task either by
the lash of a master or by animal necessities. It is the work of men who perform
it for its own sake, and not that they may get more to eat or drink, or wear, or
display. In a state of society where want was abolished, work of this sort would
be enormously increased."

Henry George

"people who lead what are
called live of fashion and pleasure must have some other object in view, or they
would die of ‘ennui;’ they support it only because they imagine that they
are gaining position, making friends, or improving the chances of their
children. Shut a man up, and deny him employment, and he must die or go mad.

It is no labor in itself that is
repugnant to man; it is not the natural necessity for exertion which is a curse.
It is only labor which produces nothing-exertion of which he cannot see the
results. To toil day after day, and yet get but the necessaries of life, this is
indeed hard; it is like the infernal punishment of compelling a man to pump lest
he be drowned, or to trudge on a treadmill lest he be crushed. But, released
from this necessity, men would but work the harder and the better, for then they
would work as their inclinations led them; then would they seem to be really
doing something for themselves and others."

Henry George

"This strange and unnatural
spectacle of large number of willing men who cannot find employment is enough to
suggest the true cause to whomsoever can think consecutively. For, though custom
has dulled us to it, it is a strange and unnatural thing that men who wish to
labor, in order to satisfy their wants, cannot find the opportunity-as, since
labor is that which produces wealth, the man who seeks to exchange labor for
food, clothing, or any other form of wealth, is like one who proposes to give
bullion for coin, or wheat for flour. We talk about the supply of labor and the
demand for labor, but, evidently there are only relative terms. The supply of
labor is everywhere the same-two hands always come into the world with one
mouth, twenty-one boys to every twenty girls; and the demand for labor must
always exist as long as men want things which labor alone can procure. We talk
about the "want of work," but, evidently, it is not work that is short
while want continues; evidently, the supply of labor cannot be too great, nor
the demand for labor too small, when people suffer for the lack of things that
labor produces. The real trouble must be that supply is somehow prevented from
satisfying demand, that somewhere there is an obstacle which prevents labor from
producing the things that laborers want.

"When we speak of labor
crating wealth, we speak metaphorically. Man creates nothing. The whole human
race, were they to labor forever, could not create the tiniest mote that floats
in a sunbeam-could not make this rolling sphere one atom heavier or one atom
lighter. In producing wealth, labor, with the aid of natural forces, but works
up, into the forms desired, pre-existing mater, and, to produce wealth, must,
therefore, have access to this matter and to these forces-that is to say, to
land. The land is the source of all wealth."

Henry George

"The Wall Street
Journal, in a front-page story by Tony Horwitz, dated Dec 1,1994, describes
how some of the "growth jobs' of the nineties are totally incompatible with
individual freedom. In the poultry processing industry, for example,
assembly-line workers labor under cramped, unsanitary, hazardous conditions.
Having received a modicum of training, they must perform monotonous tasks at a
rapid speed, risking their health at a wage of $5 an hour. These employees are
subject to harsh work rules, company-imposed restrictions on doctor visits and
injury claims, and usually lack labor union representation. Similarly, in
another American "growth industry," clerical workers who process
charity donations are given mind-numbing tasks with high-pressure quotas in
exchange for low wages and few benefits. While they silently toil in windowless
rooms-forbidden to talk, decorate their desks, or take an break except for
lunch-they are closely monitored by video cameras and daily printouts of their
errors.

Horwitz characterizes
these jobs as "work that is faster than ever before, subject to Orwellian
control and electronic surveillance, and reduced to limited tasks that are
numbingly, repetitive, potentially crippling and stripped of any meaningful
skills or the chance to develop them." These jobs pay the lowest possible
wages and yet represent the best or only employment available for many
Americans. Grueling work for eight hours or more, with permission required even
to go to the bathroom, strains the limits of human endurance. Safety violations
and injuries are often ignored. Years of hard labor lead to no better future.
"While American industry reaps the benefit of a new, high-technology era,
it has consigned a large class of workers to a Dickensian time warp, laboring
not just for meager wages but also under dehumanizing and often dangerous
conditions."

Charles A Reich

Opposing the System

The reason why, in spite of the
increase of productive power, wages constantly tend to a minimum which will give
but a bare living, is that, with increase of productive power, rent tends to
even greater increase, thus producing a constant tendency to the forcing down of
wages."

Henry George

"Napoleon ended his speech
with a reminder of Boxer’s Two favorite maxims, "I will work
harder," and "Comrade Napoleon is always right", maxims, he said,
which every animal would do well to adopt as his own."

George Orwell

Animal Farm

The Myth of Sisyphus by
Albert Camus (1913-1960)

The gods had condemned
Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the
stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought, with some reason,
that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

If one believes Homer,
Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another
tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I
see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became
the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain
levity in regard to the gods. he stole their secrets. Aegina, the daughter of
Aescopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that
disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered
to tell about it on condition that Aesopus would give water to the citadel of
Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. he
was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sissyphus had
put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted , silent
empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her
conqueror.

It is said also that
Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered
her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus
woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to
human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to
chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed
water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the
infernal darkness. Recalls. signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many
years more he lived, facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the
smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the
impudent man by the collar and snatching him from his joys led him forcibly back
to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.

You have already
grasped that Sissyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his
passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and
his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being
is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for
the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld.
Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth,
one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to
roll it and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed
up, the cheek tight against the stone, the should bracing the clay-covered mass,
the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human
security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort,
measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then
Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world
whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to
the plain.

It is during that
return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to
stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet
measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour,
like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the
hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and
gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is
stronger than his rock.

If this myth is
tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be,
indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today
works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd.
But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus,
proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his
wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity
that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is
no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

If the descent is thus
sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not
too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was
in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the
call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in
man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless
grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing
truths perish from being acknowledged Thus, Oedipus at the outset obeys fate
without knowing it. But from the moment he knows his tragedy begins. Yet at the
same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to
the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "
Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul makes me
conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Oedipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov,
thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern
heroism.

One does not discover
the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What! by
such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the
absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a
mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discover. It
happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I
conclude that all is well," says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. it
echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. it teaches that all is not, has
not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with
dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings. It makes of fate a human
matter, which must be settled among men.

All Sisyphus' silent
joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing.
Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the
idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad
wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls,
invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of
victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.
The absurd man says yes, and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. If there
is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is but one
which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself
to be master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over
his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he
contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by
him, combined under his memory's eye, and soon sealed by his death. Thus,
convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to
see, who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is
still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at
the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus
teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too
concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to
him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of
that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward
the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus
happy."

Albert Camus

"It ill becomes anyone today
to admit that he lives without working. Since Marx and Proudhon, labor has been
universally accepted as a positive social value and a philosophical concept. As
a result, the ancients' contempt for labor, their undisguised scorn for those
who work with their hands, their exaltation of leisure as the sine qua non of a
'liberal' life, the only life worthy of man, shocks us deeply. Not only
was the worker regarded as a social inferior; he was base, ignoble. It has often
been held, therefore, that a society like the Roman, so mistaken about what we
regard as proper values, must have been a deformed society, which inevitably
paid the price of its deformity. The ancients' contempt for labor, the argument
goes , explains their economic backwardness, their ignorance of technology. Or,
according to another argument, the reason for one deformity must be sought in
another: contempt for labor, we are told, had its roots in that other scandalous
fact of Roman life, slavery.

And yet, if we are
honest we must admit that the key to this enigma lies within ourselves. True, we
believe that work is respectable and would not dare to admit to idleness.
Nevertheless, we are sensitive to class distinctions and, admit it or not,
regard workers and shopkeepers as people of relatively little importance. We
would not want ourselves or our children to sink to their station, even if we
are a little ashamed of harboring such sentiments."

Paul Veyn

A History of Private Life: from
Pagan Rome to Byzantium

"Millions are oppressed by
manual work, either because there is too much of it, or because the life has
been taken out of it be standardization, or because its alternate praising up or
depreciation by so-called labor leaders replaces their natural attachment to
their occupation by uncertainty and sometimes hatred. Many hundreds of thousands
who would feel inclined to think highly of their work and realize its dignity
cannot indulge the tendency because of the insecurity in which they live. When
you see the traces of untimely wariness on a man's face, in nine cases out of
ten, you may be sure that overwork is not to be blamed; what is to be blamed is
the anxiety of not having any work to do; that has sunk the eye and pinched the
mouth. Literary or artistic people with a vocation and no means are the
classical instance and well deserve to be. After they become famous their
historians are apt to repeat the thoughtless and heartless saw that it is good
for writers and artists to be a little hungry. The fact is that wealth is
injurious to art, but artists cannot live without a certain amount of success.
Failure and anxiety have never been known to elicit the best from a man's
faculties. Too often they have done the reverse. The man seeks refuge in
misanthropy or in dissipation. If he tries the usual path to success, endeavors
to make himself agreeable or popular, curries favor with rich or influential
people, he loses his dignity, and the quality of this thinking deteriorates simultaneously."

Ernest Dimnet

The Art of Thinking

"Every individual mind has its
assigned province of action, a place which it was intended of God to fill, and
to which always it is tending. it is that which the greatest cultivation of all
his powers will enable him to do best.....It may be hidden from him for years.
Unfavorable associations, bad advice, or his own perversity may fight against it
but he will never be at ease, he will never act with efficiency, until he finds
it. Whatever it be, it is his high calling. This is his mark and prize."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"As Americans go forth into
the twenty-first century, new technology allows us to work smarter-but we are
also working harder. Ask most Americans how things are really going and you are
bound to hear stories of burnout and desperation. We don't hear much about that,
with the national PR machine breathlessly trumpeting the message that "we
are living in the wealthiest country on earth." But behind the door of
every apartment, town home, brownstone, or studio of the people fueling this
economy, there is a different story, one of exhaustion and foreboding, a story about
the lives, family, and leisure time usurped by a continuous workload that has no
end in sight."

-Handan Tulay Satirogolu Citizen
Culture Magazine Oct 2004

****************************************

Book: "Crossing the Unknown
Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity" by David Whyte

Book: "Blood, Sweat, and
Tears: The Evolution of Work" by Richard Donkin

Book: "Labor's Untold
Story" by Richard O. Boyar & Herbert M. Morais

Book: "The One Best Way:
Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency" by Robert Kanigel

Book: "Shadow Work" by
Ivan Illich

Book: "Closing the Iron Cage:
The Scientific Management of Work and Leisure"